Taxonomy And Molecular Phylogenetics Of Clubionidae From China(Arachnida: Araneae)

Clubionidae,belonging to the Order Araneae of the Class Arachnida,is a member of Dionycha and currently contains 632 species of 16 genera from all over the world.At present,153 species of five genera have been reported from China.Comprehensive systematic study on the family Clubionidae is still lacking,and the taxomony of the type genus Clubiona is a mess.This dissertation comprehensively studied the systematics of Chinese Clubionidae using both morphological methods and molecular phylogenetic approaches.In this paper,the taxonomic system,research history and distribution pattern of the Clubionidae are briefly described,the identification keys to the genera and species-groups from China are compiled,and the new taxa are illustrated and properly described.In this paper,107 species of four genera of the Clubionidae from China are reported,containing 101 species of Clubiona(including 11 new species: Clubiona aviformis sp.nov.,Clubiona biprocessa sp.nov.,Clubiona changbaishan sp.nov.,Clubiona gracilenta sp.nov.,Clubiona mirabilis sp.nov.,Clubiona paracordata sp.nov.,Clubiona subbrachyptera sp.nov.,Clubiona subhuiming sp.nov.,Clubiona suboppressa sp.nov.,Clubiona subzhangmuensis sp.nov.,Clubiona umbelliformis sp.nov.and three new records in China: Clubiona allotorta Dankittipakul & Singtripop,2008,Clubiona caucasica Mikhailov & Otto,2017 and Clubiona oceanica Ono,2011),one specie of Maditia,three species of Porrhoclubiona(including one new combination: Porrhoclubiona wulingensis(Yu & Chen,2017)was transferred from Clubiona)and two species of Pristidia.In total,65 plates are included in the paper,of which 60 are photographs and five are illustrations.Based on morphological and molecular evidences,the species of Clubiona in China are divided into 15 species-groups:(1)bomiensis-group,(2)falciforma-group,(3)hystrix-group,(4)japonica-group,(5)jucunda-group,(6)lutescens-group,(7)moralis-group,(8)obesa-group,(9)ovalis-group,(10)pallidula-group,(11)qiyunensis-group,(12)reclusa-group,(13)similis-group,(14)trivialis-group and(15)zhangmuensis-group.This dissertation provides detailed diagnostic characteristics for each species-group and a key to species-groups.There are still 12 species could not be classified into any of the 15 species-group.In this dissertation,a large number of molecular data of Clubionidae,especially the genus Clubiona,were obtained for the first time for phylogenetic analyses.Four gene fragments(863 sequences in total)of COI,28 S rDNA,12 S rDNA and ITS2 were extracted from 257 specimens.The dataset includes 100 species of four genera and four outgroup species of Anyphaenidae.The results of phylogenetic analyses from the concatenated four-gene dataset support the monophyly of the species groups based on the morphological characters,but challenge the monophyly of Clubiona.